Re: [TUHS] screen editors and beyond

Warner Losh writes: That's a great reason. I never did any bodybuilding with emacs so I have different muscle memory. There is another reason why I stayed away from emacs which is that I was running projects at the time - I had graduated from being an individual contributor. The multiple versions of emacs got in the way. We had too many instances where one person would ask another person for help or to review something, but people using different tools interfered with the ability of people to walk over to another terminal and get stuff done. Because of this, I made and enforced a rule that said that one could only use shell aliases if they didn't redefine any existing commands. It was important for people to be able to work together. Things were getting so flexible that it was as if everybody had their own custom power outlets at their desks preventing any other group member from coming over and plugging something in. Taking this in a different direction, one of the other rules that I enforced was "don't redefine the programming language." This is in my mind right now as I try to navigate the linux kernel. Someone obviously didn't like C and made a bunch of overly complicated constructs via macros to change it to something else generating bad code in the process. It reminded me of the first time that I ran across this, which was the Bourne shell in C redefined as Algol. I recently asked Steve about why he did this and he did give me an answer which he said I couldn't share until he refined it. He probably forgot over the holidays but since I think he's on this list maybe he'll weigh in. One amusing thing that Steve told me which I think I can share is why the symmetry of case-esac, if-fi was broken with with do-done; it was because the od command existed so do-od wouldn't work! Jon